Research
How an AI agent talked itself into an XXE — and was right
Publication date not yet evaluated · Added equixly.com
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Single-source research — one report is available.
Why it matters
Equixly's write-up demonstrates that agentic AI can autonomously reason its way to and confirm blind vulnerabilities like XXE that traditional scanners miss, signaling both a maturing offensive-AI capability and a new class of automated attacker defenders must anticipate.
Equixly describes how its autonomous AI agent, starting only from an OpenAPI specification and low-privileged credentials, identified an XML External Entity (XXE) injection in the chat layer of a collaboration platform, flagged an ordinary-looking JSON message-forward field as an XML sink, and confirmed it out-of-band. The agent then chained the flaw to local file reads and server-side request forgery to exfiltrate a cleartext database credential during a grey-box assessment.